Кевин Уилсон - Nothing to See Here

“Help me out,” she said, holding out her arms like a baby. I leaned forward to reach for her, and she slightly altered her posture. I watched her whole body turn electric and wild, and she grabbed my right arm by the wrist and pulled my entire hand into her mouth. She bit down so hard on my hand that I screamed with such force that the sound just disappeared, the kind of pain where time stops. I looked at Bessie, my hand still wriggling around in her mouth, and she looked like she was smiling.

I fell into the pool and Bessie held my head under the water, yanking my hair, scratching like crazy at my face. The alley cats from my youth had nothing on this wild, psychotic kid. I popped my head up and heard Bessie scream, “Run, Roland!” and I saw his form hop out of the water like he’d been shot from a cannon. He was running for the fence, but I was back under the water, Bessie’s claws digging into the skin in the corner of my right eye, ripping at my cheek. I tried to grab her, to get some purchase on her squirmy body, slick from weeks in the pool, and she bit me again, and I felt like her tooth had cracked on my knuckle. I made it back to the surface, and I could see blood spinning in the water, riding the chlorine.

“Shit, Roland! Get out of here,” she cried out, and I heard Carl screaming, “What the fuck is going on?” I had swallowed so much water, but I finally managed to get my arms around Bessie’s waist, her legs kicking out in front of her while I held on from behind. She was scratching at my interlocked fingers, but I wasn’t going to let go.

“Bessie, for fuck’s sake. I’m going to be your best friend,” I said, and I sounded so puny and whiny and like a fucking jerk. I hated myself.

And then, suddenly, I realized how hot Bessie was, even in the water, the heat rising up and reddening her skin, turning it almost purple. There was so much steam coming off of her. I panicked, I guess, and so I pulled her under the surface of the water. I counted to fifteen, then thirty, felt the heat recede from her skin, hoping I hadn’t killed her. I lifted her up, carrying her to the steps. She went a little limp in my arms, had given up. “Where’s Roland?” she asked. “Did he get away?”

I sat on the stairs, still holding her, and we looked over at Roland, who had tried to hop the fence and gotten snagged by his swim trunks, his pale white butt showing while he hung upside down, Carl muttering bullshit as he tried to free the fabric from the fencing.

“I’m not coming with you!” Bessie shouted, and she found some hidden strength inside her, pulled free of my arms, and started to run for the house. I grabbed her ankle and she fell, hard, skinning her knee. Her shirt started smoking, the fabric singeing along the neckline, but it was soaking wet and couldn’t really catch fire. I realized there were delicate waves of yellow flame moving up and down Bessie’s little arms. And then, like a crack of lightning, she burst fully into flames, her body a kind of firework, the fire white and blue and red all at once. It was beautiful, no lie, to watch a person burn.

I heard Carl shout, and I turned to see Roland now on fire, though not as bright as his sister. Carl simply kicked him into the pool, where he fell like a rock, extinguished.

I saw Mr. Cunningham holding a giant fork out for safety. Mrs. Cunningham was still asleep.

“You want to stay here?” I shouted back at Bessie. My hand was hurting so bad, the kind of pain where I didn’t even want to look at it because I knew how fucking angry it would make me, how many times I would time-travel to think about all the ways I could have kept my finger from being bitten off by some feral child. “You want to stay with those old people who are boring and probably don’t even know what things you like?”

“No,” she said. Her skin was turning back to a normal shade, the fire already flickering out. It seemed like their bodies could only sustain the fire for a brief moment. Her shirt was in tatters, almost ash.

“Or do you want to be with me because I’m cool, and I’ll keep being cool, and you’ll like hanging out with me?” I just kept on going, didn’t even wait for her to respond. “You want to stay here with your shitty grandparents and never get fed and scratch bug bites underneath sheets that haven’t ever been washed? You want that?”

“No, I don’t want that,” Bessie said, not crying but wheezing from anger.

“Or do you want to come with me, and I’ll take care of you and buy you all new clothes, and I’ll feed you whatever you want and play games with you and watch movies with you and swim in the pool with you and rock you to bed and kiss you good night and sing you lullabies and then wake you up and let you watch cartoons?”

“That,” she said, her teeth chattering. “We want that.”

“Okay, then,” I said. “Then you have to trust me that I’m going to take care of you. It’s going to be weird, okay? It’s going to make you angry sometimes. But I’ll take care of you. It’s what I’m going to do.”

By this point, Carl had fished Roland out of the pool and was carrying him over to us; the boy was listening intently.

“Are you our stepmother?” Roland asked.

“No—Jesus Christ—no, I’m not your stepmother. I’m just—”

“She’s like a babysitter that never leaves,” Carl suddenly said.

“Never?” Bessie and Roland said at the same time, and I realized how this could go bad so quickly.

“Never,” I said, smiling. Bessie still had a little trail of my blood running down her chin.

“We catch on fire,” Bessie told me.

“I know,” I said. “It’s okay.”

“We just go with you?” she asked, and I nodded, exhausted.

Bessie looked at Roland, who simply nodded his assent. “We’ll go with you,” they both said at the same time.

“I’ve packed up your belongings,” Carl told them.

Roland shrugged. “We don’t have that much stuff to bring,” the boy informed us. He had stripes buzzed into the sides of his hair, and I was shocked to realize that their hair was unsinged. I don’t know why, with these demon children bursting into flames right in front of me, their bad haircuts remaining intact was the magic that fully amazed me, but that’s how it works, I think. The big thing is so ridiculous that you absorb only the smaller miracles.

“I’ve got Kool-Aid,” Carl said, trying to sound cheery.

The kids smiled, but I shook my head. “No Kool-Aid,” I told him. I didn’t want these kids drugged, didn’t want things to start off any worse than they already had.

Bessie frowned. “You said you’d give us whatever we wanted,” she said. Her face reddened a little, and I was already dealing with some trauma, I think.

“We’ll get you some sodas at a gas station,” I said, and Carl simply nodded; maybe he was as tired as I was.

“That’s good,” Roland said. “Sun Drop, okay?”

“Okay,” I told him.

“Your hand is really messed up,” Roland said.

I finally looked down at it, had forgotten about the pain. It was just a dull throbbing sensation traveling all the way up my arm. There were tooth marks all over my hand, purple and deep, blood bubbling out of the wounds. The worst were on my index and middle fingers. I could barely bend them now.

“I scratched up your face some, too,” Bessie offered sheepishly.

“Sorry about your knee,” I told her, and she just waved me off.

“I’ve got a first aid kit in the van,” Carl said. “You get the kids dressed and I’ll come back with it.”

I led the children past their grandparents. Mr. Cunningham’s steak was now burning and charred on the grill. The kids acted like the grandparents weren’t even there.